Is Terminator 2 actually woke?

Whatevermancer

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Consider the following:
1)Sarah Connor beats up several male guards during her escape attempt. This is not feminine behaviour and is unrealistic, given that she's a woman and an average man could've easily overpowered her. The screenwriters could've had her patiently wait for T-800 and John to rescue her, but they didn't. Why? Clearly, to add the feminist message of "girls are just as strong as boys".

2)After escaping the loony bin, Sarah Connor secretly sets out to kill Miles Dyson. I'm not gonna mention how it's unfeminine of her, cause I've already covered it in the previous point, but she confronts him saying the following:
Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction...
Which is clearly another feminist message, except this time it's demonizing men.

3)Miles Dyson. He's the lead engineer on the Skynet project. He's also black. Le black science man?!
 
This is not feminine behaviour and is unrealistic, given that she's a woman and an average man could've easily overpowered her.
Yes, I also take 4x2s to the face regularly when spatting with my wife, it's nothing.
The key was that it was natural, you were watching a movie in which Arnold wields a fucking gatling AND shoots it. You know he didn't actually fire it live right?
No, I'm talking meta level, not about him playing a humanoid combat robot from the future.
A chick hitting some guard in the face with a piece of wood and other admittedly more unrealistic things don't phase a non-autistic viewer in movies like that.
Which is clearly another feminist message, except this time it's demonizing men.
Men who ponder how they can kill as many people as possible while getting paid to do that, yes.

That is the difference, it's an anti war message, today's woke shit actually demonizes men as a whole.

Today they drop the specifics, they don't say "men like you", anymore, but just "men"
 
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Yes, I also take 4x2s to the face regularly when spatting with my wife, it's nothing.
The key was that it was natural, you were watching a movie in which Arnold wields a fucking vulcan gattling AND shoots it. You know he didn't actually fire it right?
No, I'm talking meta level, not about him playing a humanoid combat robot from the future.
A chick hitting some guard in the face with a piece of wood and other admittedly more unrealistic things don't phase a non-autistic viewer in movies like that.
Pretty sure he did actually fire it. You can handle those things if it fires blanks, and it's very easy for those to fire blanks since they are fully electrically operated. They did the same in Predator, you can see the crimped blank cartridges in some scenes.

Terminator 2 worked because it puts in the time to show how Sarah Connor got to where she is. It shows her training even while locked up, and Linda Hamilton put on the muscles to make it believable. The movie tells us about how she went training with various guerilla fighters all over the world and how she's massively paranoid and crazy about the impending apocalypse. All that makes it believable when she dismantles the bed and smacks the guard. James Cameron generally likes to put in strong, female characters, but compared to the modern Disney Strong Female Character, he usually took the time to make said character believable.
 
Terminator 2 worked because it puts in the time to show how Sarah Connor got to where she is.
It's just a power fantasy on par with firing a Gatling with live rounds, being on target, hitting stuff.
Sure, ahnuld gets the terminator excuse, but sarah's feats are way less cuckoo than his to begin with, I'd hazard to say.
It's fair and both require suspension of disbelief.
Nobody talked about that back then unlike people do now, which is saying the most.
It just werks. Or at least it did, before woke division.
 
Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction...
Sarah Connor goes on an antisemitic, transphobic tirade. NOT woke.
 
The flaw with that stone toss comic and general argument is that woke is more than just progressivism, it's smug self satisfied forced hyper progressivism. When people used to unironical call them selves woke they basically used it to mean they where enlightened and it was there duty to wake people up and get them to the elevated true standard of morality of blindly accepting beautiful beared women with prostates, pregnant men and teaching babys how not to be racist. Sure valve probably felt cool about making your love interest a badass mixed lady but they weren't tying to preach that women are better then useless lousy men or that mixed brown people are better than all those evil white colonizers, shes just sneaky and compatient from living her whole like in the apocalypse. Most importantly she is an actual character. Same with Sarah conner they probably felt progressive making a super badass women but its more to show a contrast from her in the first movie and how the impact of her knowledge of the future turned her crazy. She's can't beat up dudes because she's a cool girl boss that's showing how incompetent men are, it's because she's become a crazy apocalypse prepper who ruined her life to get ready for the robots while everyone else is blissfully ignorant and unprepared.
Also isn't D.E.I. literally workplace diversity hires, how does that relate to video game characters? I fucking hate grifters taking these terms and immediately ignoring what they actually mean to turn it into a catch all progressive buzzword and instantly devaluing it until using it becomes embarrassing and then do it all again for the next buzzword
 
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Even though Terminator 2 was released in 1991, it was set 1995-ish with a 10 or 11-year old John Connor, so Sarah Connor had a decade to toughen herself up after the events of The Terminator, and she was already changing her attitude from helpless waitress to warrior mother by the end of the first movie, knowing that she had to get tough to try and avert Judgement Day.
 
No, I don't think so.

Sarah Connor isn't your average woman. She can be seen working out in her room doing pull ups. It's also stated in the movie that she went through some kind of survival training. Probably by some militia in the Southwest. T2 was made in the very early 90's. Back then militias were seen as an actual threat. Instead of the fat LARPing Boomers we know them as today. She also attacks the guards with some kind of weapon. It's been a while since I watched the movie, but I think she managed to get a nightstick from one of them. If some woman whacks you with a nightstick or whatever you are definitely going to feel it. Especially if she puts any kind of effort into it.

With everything she went through in the first movie and what she knows it's clear she isn't doing well mentally. So, you have a woman that's been locked in a cell working out with some obvious paramilitary training who is also hyper aggressive and probably rather unhinged. I wouldn't say that's a normal average woman.
 
Yes, I too have a magic Y chromasome that makes me immune to someone leaping out at me and whacking me in the head with a steelbar if my assailant is female. Or immediately able to stand there and laugh if someone heel-palms me upwards in the nose which iirc she does to someone else shortly after.

Less sarcastic answer: No, it is not woke because Woke isn't about promoting "minorities" it's about knocking down existing heroes and cultural norms. That's why despite it being entirely possible to create new works with original heroes and heroines, what they really want is to make existing ones non-White or non-Straight. You can make as many female-led spy-action films like Salt or Atomic Blonde as you want, they're still going to want Bond to be female because it's about taking away from you. Does T2 do this? No it does not. It creates an admirable and relatable heroine who trains hard to become what she is (we see this) and when she fights comes from a place of aggression and skill, not WWF wrestling.

The holy trinity of 80's female badasses (Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley and Billy's mom from Gremlins - like seriously, she fucking blends one of them) all have one thing in common. They're not knocking down normal regular masculinity.

I've said this before but the gold standard example is Ripley in Aliens 2 when she goes to Apone and Hicks and says she feels like a third wheel and asks if there's anything she can do.

How do they respond? Apone challenges her exactly the same way he would a guy, he says: "I don't know - is there anything you can do?" Ripley pauses for a second, thrown off, then says "well I can drive that loader" and demonstrates that she can. What's important here? It's that normal male bonding and interaction isn't shown to be wrong and that she rises to it. Admirably in fact. That's why both men and women like the character. She accepts she has to prove herself and does so realistically and with humour.

In a modern Hollywood movie, that same scene would play out with the two men dismissing her and then being humiliated by how much better she is at driving a loader than they are thus proving that male modes of interaction (challenge and prove your status) are to be condemned compared to immediate acceptance and not doubting women.

So no, T2 is not work. More contraversially, neither is T3 because whilst the theme of moving on from brute force (T800 murdering people on camera and all night long) to cunning and more nuanced hunting (T-X hacking into databases, subtle infiltration) utilises Arnie as a hypermasculine incarnation of the former and an attractive blonde woman as the incarnation of the latter, it's not really about male vs. female and doesn't exactly knock down maleness per se. John Connor is a fuck-up by that point but the female character doesn't humiliate him, she gives him a path forward and by the end of the movie he's had a redemption arc and the two are working together.

Later Terminator movies - filled with denigration of the importance of motherhood, pro-immigration motifs and all the rest. They're woke. Not T2. And especially not just because a woman can hurt a dude. You're welcome to have a trained female fighter take some open shots at you if you doubt it.

2)After escaping the loony bin, Sarah Connor secretly sets out to kill Miles Dyson. I'm not gonna mention how it's unfeminine of her, cause I've already covered it in the previous point, but she confronts him saying the following:
Which is clearly another feminist message, except this time it's demonizing men.

This is actually counter-Woke. It's certainly not modern 3rd Wave feminism which we get today. Her message is about the importance of motherhood. Contrast that with the definitely Woke Terminator: Dark Fate in which it's about explicit as you can get that the illegal immigrant woman the terminator is after isn't being pursued because she's merely the mother of someone, but is herself the badass resistance leader. That movie is almost the exact antithesis of T1 and T2 and it is very Woke in its dismissal of Sarah Connor's importance due to being a mother.
 
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This "X is now woke all of a sudden" or "If Y was made today it would be woke" trend is retarded. I've heard claims that Morrowind of all things is now woke, at this point the "anti-woke" people are Skeptics 2.0 and will end up exactly like them. KCD2 controversy is a good example of just how retarded and clueless they are.
 
Nobody has ever defined "woke". Can't we just go back to calling things cringe and faggotry when appropriate? Why do we have to kowtow to advertiser friendly vocabulary?

(I'm not calling Terminator cringe or faggotry here btw)
 
T2 precedes the era of mentally ill people being put in charge of big budget productions and misses a lot of the story beats I consider necessary to call a medium 'woke'.
>the obligatory scene where a woman gets on her high horse and lectures a man about how immoral he is, while he just sits there and takes it silently. oftentimes this scene also involves said woman beating him up while she's talking
>the obligatory racial humiliation ritual where either a Black person or a minority from a faraway culture or country condescends to the main character about how his people have much more civilized and peaceful methods of resolving conflict. The faraway culture CAN be imaginary, i.e. space aliens
>the obligatory interracial romance which ALWAYS needs to involve at least one Black participant. In a few rare exceptions found exclusively outside of the US, the Black participant is replaced with a very dark Indian or Pakistani
 
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